William Stafford’s commitments to poetry and to nonviolence were both lifelong and often came together memorably; he could easily have been represented here with a poem against war (perhaps “At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border,” or “For the Unknown Enemy”), or with some of the many aphorisms and reflections on conflict he jotted in his journals (collected posthumously by his son Kim in 2003, in Every War Has Two Losers).
Stafford’s 1947 memoir Down in My Heart recounts the four years he spent in “alternative service” in Civilian Public Service Camps in Arkansas, California, and Illinois. “To Meet a Friend”—a chapter from the memoir—dramatizes one of the difficult choices that faced conscientious objectors in World War II. Some, like Stafford, conformed to the rules set up to accommodate them, performing “work of national importance” instead of fighting, in Stafford’s case forestry work. Others, pushed more severely by their principles, protested even this nonviolent alternative, and faced severer consequences. Stafford’s portrait of his friend George is a study in the kind of mixed emotions that must have made such choices, like many wartime choices, so difficult.
After his release, Stafford (1914–1993) took a teaching job at Lewis & Clark College, remaining there for most of the rest of his life. He won the National Book Award in 1963 for his collection Traveling Through the Dark and was named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.
I do not want to live here.
The water is good, and the soil grows corn.
The people like each other.
I do not want to live here.
The land slopes right,
and the sun likes it here.
There is incredible white snow in winter.
But every day a native of the world falls down.
Many are hurt in the mills and in the fields.
Some day everyone will be blind.
I do not want to just live here.
IT was dark all over camp that night when George called from Los Angeles. Our few lights over the paths were still shaded and dimmed because of the Coast dim-out; and the cabins where the rows of men were sleeping were all dark—just one light, down in the library barracks; George used to sit there late. It was the only place like home in all the camp.
I took the call in the little Forest Service office, while the night watchman leaned against the door in the shadow behind me; and as I listened to George I watched the shaded light over the desk swing its cone back and forth over the board for truck keys and the Monday assignment sheet and the old metal filing case where we kept the work records of each man—the record of his service, his AWOLs, his refusals to work: the record that saved him or sent him to prison.
George was on bail, awaiting trial, and he suggested that I get leave and meet him for a day in town.
I met him at the Paseo, and we walked around the square. He was thinner than ever, a skinny college boy, with a mobile face that could turn suddenly still and inexpressive. I remember exactly how it was that day, talking to my friend, out on bail and due to go to prison in a week. When you are a CO and near the prison stage yourself, you notice certain things:
Along State Street after the rain the people go, smiling. They stop to look at the store windows. On a newspaper rack someone has hung up a girl’s glove, picked up and saved for an unknown person. In a room of the library where you go the students kneel to get books from the lower shelves. Often they remain kneeling to leaf through, to follow, to wonder. Then they sit down, legs drawn up, feet out beside them, and forget all else.
Two girls come in and wait. A few minutes later the parents of one of them come in, the mother crippled, hobbling forward, arms outstretched to greet one of the girls. The father waits.
The girl at the desk in the library is waiting. She tosses out the cards without looking up. Her suit is all right angles, and her walk is on a marked line. Someone is watching her.
No one is watching you. You are the person beside the aisle. People who wave are waving at another person, someone behind you. On the street no one calls your name; but in spite of not talking to anyone you are learning everyone’s language—more than ever before. You are going to a big school, with halls that go everywhere. It costs everything you have to attend it. Its books are all over the world.
That is the way it was in town that Sunday afternoon being a CO with George. He was a criminal—not, like others so punished, because he lacked a sense of social responsibility, but because of an oversupply; and his experiences during the month since he had gone over the hill from camp had made him see a complex of ideas, a kind of picture, which he tried to express to me as we walked around the town and then down to the beach where we sat on the sand and looked out at the Pacific and the blue islands across the channel.
After leaving camp George had worked a few days for a church in Los Angeles and then had started toward Chicago, where a job in a social settlement house awaited him. He was standing under a street light in Amarillo waiting for a ride when the police car swerved up beside him. In the big room at the jail where the officers first took him were men being held for investigation, and the policemen had said to them:
“Here’s a dirty yellow bastard who wouldn’t fight for his country. Anyone who wants to bust him—go ahead.” No one swung, though many talked, in phrases like the policeman’s.
“I’ve never felt so far from home as on that night,” George told me, as he lifted sand and let it sift through his fingers; “but I’ve had worse nights since. They put me in the tank that night and issued the bust-him invitation to the others there, but they were more sore at the cops than they were at me.”
I thought of George in camp—his singing, his fiery speeches at camp meetings, his long discussions in the barracks while we lay around resting after work and waiting for supper. The tension in the barracks had actually become worse since the formal end of the war, and it was during one of those discussions that George had said, “As long as we grant the state the right to conscript, it is futile to hope for peace.” He stood there in the barracks by the oil-drum stove and dragged a match across the top when he said that, and he looked up and down the long barracks, shot with the late sunlight as he talked. He was headed for jail; we all knew it. The flies were buzzing along the small windows; Lennie was arguing with Dan down by the magazine rack; the roomful of conscripted men were listening, or reading, or just sprawling there to wait—and all, maybe, headed for prison.
George had sat down at his typewriter, looked at the wall in that straight way of his, and rapidly typed out a letter to the Attorney General outlining his reasons for leaving Civilian Public Service: a precedent for slave labor, not a place for constructive service in crucial times, a dictatorial program administered, in spite of the wording of the law, by military men. George signed his name and the address he expected to have in Los Angeles. He got together some essentials—Gregg’s Power of Non-Violence, a Pocket Songster, some changes of clothing, and a shirt Bob had given him. He gave Henry his ball glove, Phil his blue jacket with the hole in the elbow, and the camp co-op store his work gloves and boots. We stood and waved to him when he left, in the camp truck, before work call the next day.
That departure had been just a month ago, and now George and I were already strangers.
“How can you stay up there in camp doing Forest Service work when there are people starving abroad, and children in the cities all around here falling into delinquency? Why do you consent to waste your time up there? You know you’re just being kept out of the way.”
“I don’t consent,” I said. “I want to do something better. If I leave to do it, as you have, we both know it will mean prison. And what good can you do in prison? I can do more good where I am.”
“You can make your protest plain. You can do your best to perform the chores that need to be done; if you are kept from them, it is at least not your fault.”
“I don’t believe that I can take a stand and do something without regard to the effect of my action on others; I want to change others, not alienate them.”
“If you want to get on the good side of others, why don’t you join their army?” George would end up by saying. “No. You’ve got to draw the line against conscription—complete refusal to take orders.”
George had already found that there was no rest, no stopping place, no parole; and he had found the exhilaration of making a complete decision that ended uncertainty and the need of making other decisions.
“Why,” he said, “when I finally realized that the die was cast, that my fortune was all out there ahead of me, I was nearly too happy to just walk. I smiled so broadly that everyone I passed thought he knew me, and many smiled or said hello. I have felt so right about leaving ever since I left, that there is no doubt in my mind that I have done what I should have done.”
Everything that had happened to George in punishment for his attempt to do constructive work had strengthened his conviction that he was right to rebel.
“One night I was put in a cell by myself, Bill—in an empty block. There was only one light, and it was out in the corridor, a dim connection between me and the world, between me and light and life. And that night the bulb burned out; I was sitting there, and suddenly it was dark. Just stones and iron around me and no light, no noise. Do you know how it would be?”
I looked at George and tried to imagine; I try to imagine it sometimes now.
“I suddenly realized where I was, what might happen—how far I was from any kind of life I had ever dreamed of living. I thought of my mother, of my friends. What if no one ever got me out of there? What if it stayed dark—with bars around and me screaming—forever?”
George put his hands carefully on his knees and sat without moving, his eyes turned toward the islands.
“I think that was the worst night.
“In the Los Angeles county jail,” he went on, “the food was bad; everyone was hungry. You could buy some more if you had money, but it was expensive.
“Have you ever seen the kind of place where visitors can talk to prisoners, Bill?” he asked, breaking off and beginning on a new subject with a kind of inhale and exhale, as if freeing himself of something. “The metal screen you talk through is made of such heavy wire, and the holes between are so small, that you can hardly see unless you get only three or four inches from the wire—and that’s all you can do. There is a little corridorlike place where the visitors stand. A policeman is there to listen. . . .”
George talked for hours about the ordinary occurrences and surroundings of his life—a life that now repelled, now fascinated, me, a life that was no longer tied to considerations of policy, personal prestige, or the endless decisions, diplomacies, and hopes of ordinary social living. During that talk I learned the exhilarations of the outlaw, his personal freedoms, and his constant living with rebellion.
While George was talking, we watched a maidservant escorting two little children along the edge of the surf. One of the children could barely toddle, and he stumbled and rolled over when a reaching breaker rolled over his feet. We watched, but with no alarm, and the next wave confused and frightened him so much that when he got up he ran the wrong direction and was knocked flat by the next roller. He didn’t know any way to go but farther out. George dashed down and picked him up, while the servant wrung her hands and cried out. George came running up the sloping beach, with the child kicking and crying, and gave him to the frantic nurse. By the time George had wrung the water from his baggy trouser legs and pranced around to dry, he judged it time for him to go to the highway to catch a ride down to Los Angeles. He didn’t want to be away from the city of his parole overnight.
There wasn’t anything more to say. George was going back to be sentenced to prison; we both knew it. And I left him there by that road. He laughed and waved when he got a ride, and climbed into a car that went away fast beneath the palm trees by the open water. I walked back up State Street, looking at the society I lived in.
I got a letter from George after he was sentenced to Tucson Prison Camp. He wrote:
“I am sitting on a large white rock which separates us from the free world. Below in the valley are the straight red roofs of camp. The formidable rock houses of our supervisors blend quietly into the rocks. The blue smoke and gray steam from the powerhouse drift protectingly over the scene. Now faint, now clear, the steady hum of the dynamo comes on the breeze, and occasionally the happy cries of children at play. How I would like to play with them and romp and roll in the yard. But that would never be allowed. Still in the deepening twilight may be seen the uneven row of white rocks so coldly severing our part of camp from that of the officers. . . .”
Later I heard from him again—he was allowed seven correspondents, with a limited number of letters. He had been sent, because of nonco-operation, to a more strict prison. This time he had gone with a committee to try to get the warden to end racial segregation in the prison. The warden had said: “Yes, it’s all right for CO’s and your friends to try to make these reforms while you’re here; but you won’t be here forever, and when you leave I’ll be left with the job of administering a nonsegregated prison with prisoners who want segregation. . . .”
And the last time I heard of George I read about him on the front page of a paper in San Francisco. He and about ten others were on the fifteenth day of a hunger strike, protesting the continued imprisonment of men who would not kill and the continued drafting of men for the purpose of killing. George had been in solitary confinement for several months. The warden was ready to begin force-feeding—when the men’s health made it necessary.
As I read that paper about George, he was in prison—to stay, evidently, for some time. The war had been over for a year, and I had been free for six months. I sat there in my home, with the newspaper in my hand, and thought about George and our talk on the beach and his question, “Can you imagine how it is?” And I thought about him that night, or any night, sitting in a cell, with one bulb burning in the corridor to light the stone between him and his friends and work and the islands off across the channel.